Alex Foreman asks an interesting question at FB:
One thing I’m curious about wrt. Hebrew that I haven’t seen much scholarship about: What evidence is there for conversational use of Hebrew among Jews in the Middle Ages?
There’s fairly extensive evidence that learned people from different countries in Latin Christendom in Medieval and Early Modern Europe could and regularly did coverse in Latin. Tunberg has written a pretty amazing monograph about this.
Everything I know tells me the same ought to have been true among Jews who knew Hebrew, even if Hebrew was not the oral medium of higher instruction for Jews the way Latin was in so many contexts in the Middle Ages. Like, suppose that Jacob ben Meir met the Rambam. They’d have lots to talk about. Their only language in common would be Hebrew. I can’t imagine they wouldn’t have spoken it to each other. They’d only have needed a little work to get used to each others’ accents.
Has anyone written about this somewhere? They must have.
Seems like they must have; I thought I’d see if the Hattery can come up with anything.
To the extent that Jewish travel writers during the Middle Ages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Medieval_Jewish_travel_writers) met Jews along the way with whom they could converse only in Hebrew, that is the language they presumably used to communicate.
The historicity of at least one of the travelers (Menachen ben perets) has not been proven to the satisfaction of all who have written about him.
It was the custom of certain families to speak Hebrew on the Sabbath [and Jewish holidays?] Max Weinreich in one of his publications mentions a Jewish family in Lodon in 1835 who did so.
See too Matthias B. Lehmann’s Emissaries from the Holy Land and similar literature on the emissaries who traveled tp the Diaspora to raise money. Unless they met Jews with whom they shared a vernacular language, they must have spoken Hebrew.
The notion that “Hebrew died out until Eliezer Ben-yehuda revived it” is as mistaken as it is widespread. Hebrew did cease to be a native ~ cradle language and a regularly spoken language, but it continued in use as a written language and at times as a spoken language.
that is the language they presumably used to communicate.
Yes, it certainly stands to reason, but you’d think scholars would have written about it.
Cecil Roth’s Personalities and Events in Jewish History, while perhaps more popular than hard scholarship, does have a chapter, “Was Hebrew Ever a Dead Language?” Although much of it is, “what else could they have spoken to each other?” anecdotes about travelers, there are a few concrete examples that say so directly. William (father of Noam) Chomsky’s Hebrew, the Eternal Language has a similar, “Did Hebrew Ever Die?” chapter.
Not directly related, but with some implications: Isaac Babel has an episode where someone writes a business letter in Hebrew, because the recipient is known to be religious and will appreciate the gesture.
Nobody doubts that Hebrew continued to be used for written communications; the issue is solely whether it was used in speech. Which, sure, it must have been for all sorts of reasons, but it would be nice to have good solid evidence.
Footnote 20 in this paper, which is mostly about the literary language, but does there mention it as a lingua franca, points to this book, saying,
There’s fairly extensive evidence that learned people from different countries in Latin Christendom in Medieval and Early Modern Europe could and regularly did coverse in Latin.
An odd formulation. Is anyone arguing Latin was not used as a spoken language between learned people in Medieval Europe?
The whole discussion seems to be skewed by an ideological aversion to accepting that Hebrew was every bit as much (and as little) a “dead” language as Latin until its amazing revival as a clearcut L1 in modern times.
Certainly in the late Middle Ages, Hebrew was used by Jews who spoke differently languages to communicate with each other. I talk about this in my book, Lashon HaKodesh: History, Holiness, & Hebrew (Mosaica Press), and cite sources to this effect. For some reason, my book is supposed to be previewable on Google Books, but it seems I’m being geo-blocked here in the Holy Land, so I can’t get you an exact link. But check this out: https://www.google.co.il/books/edition/Lashon_HaKodesh_History_Holiness_Hebrew/BIELCgAAQBAJ
For the fiction end of this question, I enjoyed AB Yehoshua’s Millennium, though I cannot attest to the quality of its translation into English.
“One thing I’m curious about wrt.”
¿Qué?
wrt = “with respect to”; the trailing period is a typo.
An odd formulation. Is anyone arguing Latin was not used as a spoken language between learned people in Medieval Europe?
An odd question. No, they’re not; the point is that there’s ample evidence and discussion of the situation with Latin, whereas there doesn’t seem to be much available for Hebrew except speculation (“must have”).
@Noetica, mm
I think what is relevant here is a remark in CMOS (older edition, I suppose you have access to the newest one and can check if it still applies)
“In British practice, a distinction is made between a true abbreviation, in which the end of the word IS lopped off…and a suspension, in which the interior of the word is removed…. It is usual in Britain to spell the latter class without periods. This logical practice shows few signs of catching on in America, however. ”
I agree you would have to see wrt not as a lc acronym like radar, but as a hyphenated word without hyphens.
“It is usual in Britain to spell the latter class without periods. This logical practice shows few signs of catching on in America, however.”
It has caught on among people in the United States who follow the guideline of the United States Postal Service that no periods (full stops) be used anywhere in addresses. Thus,
245 Main St
245 Elm Av
245 Lincoln Blvd
245 Lincoln Blvd (apt 6)
New York NY 10021
and so on.
The goal of the guideline is to reduce the possibility that the electronic eyes sorting the mail misread a period or a comma as a letter or a number.
Here’s a recent post by Benjamin Suchard on when spoken Hebrew faded out, in the late Roman period (with a semi-related comment by me on J.J. Scaliger).
“Bunis on the survival of Hebrew”
March 18, 2024
https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2024/03/18/bunis-on-the-survival-of-hebrew/
the point is that there’s ample evidence and discussion of the situation with Latin
Exactly. There is ample evidence. I might even say “copious”. “Fairly extensive evidence” is the wording that I find odd. Also the odd use of “could..converse” further on, as if Foreman thinks there may be some doubt about how much the learned really used Latin in normal conversation. Not sure why he’s hedging his bets here.
In the 1950s my father worked for a company in Manchester that imported carrageenan moss from a company in Ireland. Letters from the Irish company normally at that time had the header in Irish but the content of the letter in English. By chance there was someone in the Manchester office who could write in Irish, and they sent a reply in Irish. A few days later they received a reply sheepishly asking for a translation.
I didn’t find anything in a quick scan of the books of two famous Northern travelers, Benjamin of Tudela and Petachia of Regensburg. However, Kutscher’s A History of the Hebrew Language (the English version), §255, “Occasional Use as a Spoken Language”, mentions Solomon Ibn Parḥon’s 1160 exegetical lexicon. Parḥon, a native of Aragon, compiled the lexicon while living in Salerno. His stated purposes were to compile the writings of several Medieval grammarians, and to present them in Hebrew, rather than the original Arabic of most of them, for the benefit of those living in non–Arabic speaking countries.
In its epilogue (here, a 19th century printed version; here, an easier to read variant in a 13th century copy), he writes:
My translation:
Wonderful, Y! Thanks for that.
“This logical practice shows few signs of catching on in America, however.”
Wtf.!
The footnote mentioned above in E. A. Bar-Asher Siegal’s paper on L2 acquisition of literary languages (mostly Hebrew, but applicable to Latin and Sanskrit) summarizes that same testimony (as Shlomo Ibn Parchon), so that may be the most famous case.
MMcM: I posted before reading that. I’ll take a look at Haramati’s book, too, when I get the chance.
The Bunis argument summarized in the post Stephen Goranson linked to seems to presuppose that morphosyntactic evolution in written Hebrew texts over the early Rabbinical period shows that it was a “living” language and therefore must have been a spoken language. I don’t quite follow the logic. Or is it that “okay okay, languages used primarily in written form are not necessarily frozen by definition and can show change over time, but only change that’s easily explained as interference from the writers’ actually-spoken L1”? That obviously seems like one plausible source of such changes but what’s the basis for believing it’s the only possible source?
I agree.
The classical period of Sanskrit (Kavya poetry, Kalidasa’s plays etc) came centuries after the language had ceased to be anyone’s mother tongue; it differs substantially from Vedic.
The idea that a learned language cannot evolve over time without being a vernacular is plain nonsense. It seems to be based on the analogy of post-Renaissance Latin – all the more dubious as an analogy, as the idea that you had to write like Cicero if you were going to write in Latin at all eventually proved to be the death knell for the kind of Latin-as-interlanguage used in the Middle Ages.
In the Hebrew case, an obvious candidate for influence on the written form is Aramaic, rather than L1 Hebrew.
However, I believe the arguments are more sophisticated than that: for example, Rabbinical Hebrew seems to be based on a somewhat different Hebrew dialect from Biblical Hebrew, suggesting that it at least began as a vernacular of some kind.
A lot of thinking about this assumes a strict dichotomy vernacular/learned or L1/L2 which is far from universal. Few Ghanaians are mother-tongue English speakers, but excellent control of the language is often acquired in early childhood. This Ghanaian English differs not only from British English but also from Nigerian English (any Anglophone West African can tell if a speaker is Ghanaian or Nigerian.) The language has been evolving in its own way.
Similar things can be said of Gananci Hausa (as opposed to the L1 Western Hausa dialect of actual ethnic Hausa people resident in Ghana.)
In the Hebrew case, an obvious candidate for influence on the written form is Aramaic
The bit from Parḥon, above, abundantly uses the Aramaic -in masculine plural, instead of the Hebrew -im, maybe in imitation of Aramaic-tinged Talmudic Hebrew. The 13th century MS linked to above uses -im, but that could be the copyist’s choice (it’s also missing the word “Edom”.)
זה הערוך
If he hadn’t said he was an Arabic speaker, I guess this would suffice to make it obvious…
If he hadn’t said he was an Arabic speaker, I guess this would suffice to make it obvious…
How so? Is demonstrative-noun the normal word order in Arabic?
It could be unremarkable Hebrew if זֶה is taken to be a demonstrative pronoun in apposition with הֶעָרוּך, i.e. “this, the ʿārûḵ“, rather than “this ʿārûḵ“.
BTW, the word אַכְסְנַאי ʾaḵsǝnai, which I translated as ‘visitor’, is usually more specifically the guest at a house or an inn (these days, ‘hostel’), אַכְסַנְיָה ʼaḵsanyâ (< ξενία). It suggests that these kinds of places are where the writer was thinking such conversations took place.
Yes, demonstrative-noun order is default in Arabic. I’ve noticed it in other medieval Hebrew works by L1 Arabic speakers as well.
(More specifically, demonstrative-article-noun order; a lot of languages have Dem-N, but Dem-D-N is much more distinctive.)
Interesting remarks from Chaim Rabin, The Development of the Syntax of Post-Biblical Hebrew (Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics 29), published 2000 (but written 1956 or before), p. 997ff:
(Apologies for remaining OCR errors.)
There must be some more recent studies, of course. I wonder if they add anything to this.
Y, you might find my article on the word אכסנאי interesting: https://ohr.edu/this_week/whats_in_a_word/10938
And xenophoby must be the fear of guests.
I mean, it is Sunday afternoon, you just woke up and made your coffee and then it suddenly occurs to you: “what if my beloved freinds and relatives choose this beautiful afternoon to come and spoil my morning coffee? So you walk away to turn off your mobile phone and landline phone and return but then you realise: it can be neighbours! They’re going to use the doorbell…
And then the coffee is cold and your mood is destoryed and you call your doctor. Or else you just go to the forest and have you coffee there.
That’s what “died out” means when applied to languages. No less, no more.
Of these, only Blvd would be an example of the British practice because d is the last letter of the full word. (Edit: also arguably apt.) This practice also gives you Dr without a
periodfull stop but Prof. with one.…This must be another example of the US getting a technology much earlier than everyone else, and then being stuck with a much earlier version than anyone else. I’ve never heard of such a guideline elsewhere.
I’ll put my comments here:
No, Gasthaus means “inn”; Wirt m., Wirtin f., means “host”, and Gastwirt is an otherwise redundant clarification for “host, specifically innkeeper”.
The use of th instead of t, found in the last names Wirth (very common) and evidently Gastwirth, is a mere ornamental flourish that developed in the 16th century and was abolished in 1901 outside of proper names. These same german Spellingrules codified the existing Practice of starting every Noun, but almost nothing else, with a capital Letter.
Yes, except it isn’t “often”, it’s completely regular: original *k (asterisk for “warning, this is a reconstruction”) always became *h in Germanic at the beginnings of words and at the ends of originally stressed syllables, except when preceded by *s; original *gh always became *h in Italic, including Latin.
Also, the Proto-Germanic form must have been *gastiz; the *i is what flipped the *a into e in English. The same thing happened in German, but there it was more or less immediately afterwards eliminated from the singular, leaving sg. Gast, pl. Gäste (ä is, to cut a somewhat longer story short, what e is spelled nowadays when it’s grammatically related to an a).
The whole discussion seems to be skewed by an ideological aversion to accepting that Hebrew was every bit as much (and as little) a “dead” language as Latin until its amazing revival as a clearcut L1 in modern times.
which has everything to do with maintaining the myth that contemporary ivrit is either identical to written hebrew of some earlier period or a descendant-through-continuous-natural-evolution of biblical or rabbinic hebrew, rather than the far more interesting engineered-and-then-naturalized hybrid thing that it is.
far more interesting
Yes indeed.
In fact, the myths detract from its true remarkableness.
(I’m reminded of Kofi Yakpo’s point about the English-lexifier Atlantic creoles: they are an amazing testimony to human linguistic creativity, and not “broken” anything.)
Here’s another good one, from the Book of the Pious, written ca. 1200 by Judah ben Samuel of Regensburg. Section תתקצ”ד, i.e. 994 in Wikisource is here, based on the first print edition of 1538. The corresponding version in section תשצ”ט, i.e. 799 of the 1200–1400 CE Parma manuscript, is here. The latter reads,
My translation:
Excellent!
Wonderful! Thanks for that, Y!
Is ועיניך יישירו נגדך “And let your eyes look straight before you” an abbreviation/condensation of Proverbs 4:25? Is the sentence meant to be put in the mouth of the elder? Or does it introduce a related topic?
It does indeed look like ועיניך יישירו נגדך ‘let your eyes be set straight ahead before you’ is a compressed version of עֵינֶיךָ לְנֹכַח יַבִּיטוּ וְעַפְעַפֶּיךָ יַיְשִׁרוּ נֶגְדֶּךָ ‘let your eyes look directly forward, let your pupils¹ be set straight ahead before you’. I don’t understand it. I always assumed that exact fidelity to the text of scriptures was inviolable. And if it were a matter of sloppiness, I would think later copyists would correct it.
I think it is by the writer, introducing the later topic, which is not directly related. I could have omitted it but I couldn’t resist the feces, especially seeing it written in such lovely calligraphy.
Incidentally, I saw mentioned in WP (without a reference) that The Book of the Pious is rich in the ze hā- + Noun constructions we discussed earlier. That is ascribed there to German influence… I doubt it. The plot thickens.
¹ עַפְעַפַּיִם ʿap̄ʿapayim has usually been translated as ‘eyelids’, including in Modern Hebrew. But Burnight (here) showed that the word means ‘pupils’, probably from a root ʿwp ‘to be dark’.
It occurred to me that the –זֶה הָ ze hâ- + Noun construction is due neither to Arabic nor to German influence, but to זֶה הַשַּׁעַר ze haššaʿar in Psalms 118:20 and זֶה הַיּוֹם ze hayyôm in Psalms 118:24. The two can be read with ze either as a demonstrative, ‘this gate of YHWH, the just shall pass through it’ and ‘this day which YHWH has made, let us make merry and rejoice in it’; or as a pronoun: ‘this is the gate of YHWH…’, ‘this is the day which YHWH has made…’ I don’t see that either reading is preferable to the other.
I wonder if this well-known Psalm is the source of the construction in question. If so, we should find it occuring only with the proximal זֶה ze, but not with the distal הָהוּא hāhûʾ; whereas interference from another language would presumably affect word order change evenly.
As the loanword indicates, our Anglophone ancestors thought it more respectable and less vulgar to use Latin borrowings when talking about e.g. shit, thus “feces.” It would be perfectly understandable on sociolinguistic grounds if medieval Yiddish speakers used Hebrew terms as a euphemistic or clinical-sounding way to talk about potentially taboo subjects for the same reasons. But Judah ben Samuel of Regensburg apparently wasn’t taking that approach?
I’m not sure I understand. The book is written in Hebrew, not Yiddish. The word he uses, צוֹאָה ṣôʾā is the commonest and is relatively neutral, considering. It’s a biblical word, so it can’t be that taboo.
It occurred to me that the –זֶה הָ ze hâ- + Noun construction is due neither to Arabic nor to German influence, but to זֶה הַשַּׁעַר ze haššaʿar in Psalms 118:20 and זֶה הַיּוֹם ze hayyôm in Psalms 118:24.
The one doesn’t exclude the other. For Arabic L1 speakers, the reanalysis you suggest would have come very naturally due to its congruence with Arabic models, whereas for, say, Aramaic speakers it would have been much less obvious. I doubt such a rare construction would have become dominant without some kind of external catalyst, and Arabic provides one. On the other hand, I also doubt it could have attained such wide acceptance among Hebrew writers without some kind of Biblical example to (seemingly) prove its grammaticality. In that case, we’d be dealing with genuine multiple causation.
Arabic influence could also predict that it would occur more readily with haze (which resembles, and is cognate with, hādhā) than with hahu (which neither resembles nor is cognate with dhālika).
The misunderstanding may have been mine, based on an artifact of the particular translation that may not be present in the original.
Not Medieval, but regarding Hebrew as a spoken language before Ben-Yehuda, see Tudor Parfitt’s article “The use of Hebrew in Palestine, 1800–1882”: https://academic.oup.com/jss/article-abstract/17/2/237/1668028
It does indeed look like ועיניך יישירו נגדך ‘let your eyes be set straight ahead before you’ is a compressed version of עֵינֶיךָ לְנֹכַח יַבִּיטוּ וְעַפְעַפֶּיךָ יַיְשִׁרוּ נֶגְדֶּךָ ‘let your eyes look directly forward, let your pupils¹ be set straight ahead before you’. I don’t understand it. I always assumed that exact fidelity to the text of scriptures was inviolable. And if it were a matter of sloppiness, I would think later copyists would correct it.
this didn’t jump out at me this spring, but now it has!
to my non-hebrew-reading eye, this looks very much like the mode of collaged-citation that’s very common in (at least some parts of) the piyyut and andalusi hebrew poetic canon. i can’t lay my hand on either of raymond scheindlin’s collections of translations (Wine, Women, and Death; The Gazelle), but i recall him talking about the poetics of it and breaking down a lot of examples along the way.